Retired Lake County professor teams up with astronaut to photograph International Space Station

Retired College of Lake County Dean and professional photographer Roland Miller is collaborating with Italian astronaut and photographer Paolo Nespoli to document the International Space Station's interior.

The pattern of clouds beyond the seven windows in the International Space Station's cupola was “just spectacular.”

The shot is one of retired College of Lake County professor and dean Roland Miller's favorites, part of a collaboration between Miller and Italian astronaut Paolo Nespoli to document the International Space Station's interior.

The cupola, the station's iconic observation dome, is a busy place, so Miller knew it was unlikely Nespoli had the chance to wait for that pattern to appear.

“It's a beautiful image in itself, and then the circular window almost mirrors the Earth itself — that round, blue-and-white orb,” Miller said. “The lighting on the ocean in one window is kind of silver. The pattern of clouds — I'm sure they see those actually a lot, but I've never seen a picture like that of the cupola.”

The college was not far from the Kennedy Space Center and the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station, where an old darkroom was being remodeled at the time, Miller said. He got a call asking about how to dispose of the chemicals.

While helping the base solve that issue, Miller said he found himself on a tour of the launchpads for NASA’s Gemini missions in the mid-1960s.

“It was all falling apart,” he said. “I knew immediately I wanted to photograph it.”

It took Miller a couple of years to get the permission he needed to do the project, photos from which were hung in NASA’s astronaut crew quarters for some time, where astronaut Cady Coleman saw them.

The two eventually connected, and she proposed a project that would bring Miller's photographic approach to the International Space Station.

Mark Kodiak Ukena/News-Sun

College of Lake County Dean and professional photographer Roland Miller discusses his collaborated work with an Italian astronaut, to document the International Space Station's inner workings, on Monday, May 21, 2018 in Grayslake.

College of Lake County Dean and professional photographer Roland Miller discusses his collaborated work with an Italian astronaut, to document the International Space Station's inner workings, on Monday, May 21, 2018 in Grayslake. (Mark Kodiak Ukena/News-Sun)

Miller describes his work as having “a combined documentary and abstract approach,” and he added that his goal is to record the interior of the station in a way that had a strong emphasis on design and composition.

“There have been hundred of thousands — actually probably millions — of photographs taken looking out the windows of the space station and people doing things inside the station, but they're not really looking at specific parts of the station itself,” he said. “I didn't want to recreate what other people were already doing. It didn't make any sense.”

The question was how to accomplish it.

Miller was ultimately inspired by the flute duet Coleman performed with musician Ian Anderson, founder of the rock band Jethro Tull, in 2011. Coleman was 220 miles above Earth on the space station while Anderson was on the ground in Russia.

Coleman put Miller in touch with Nespoli, a “brilliant guy” who had been a photographer in the Italian army, Miller said.

Nespoli said in an email he always enjoyed photography, and the chance to being able to contribute to a project about the International Space Station was very appealing to him.

Nespoli arrived at the station for a six-month stint in July 2017, Miller said. He worked with Miller in his off time, producing what will be about 40 to 50 finished products.

The two had a couple of brief opportunities to discuss the project before he left, Nespoli said in an email. Once in space with the project going, they talked on the phone and via emails.

Nespoli used draft photographs taken by Miller at mock-ups of the International Space Station in Houston or screenshots Miller took using Google Street View as reference when setting up the actual photographs.

“It was a very symbiotic relationship,” Miller said, adding that the goal was not for Nespoli to be like “a robot doing what I tell him to do, but then to put his own (touch). He lives up there.”

The project turned out to be more technically challenging than Nespoli said he expected, he added in the email. He had expected his contribution to be similar to his role in executing the hundreds of experiments astronauts do in space.

“I am not the scientist and I do not need to fully understand the science behind an experiment,” he said. “My role is to be the scientist’s hands and what I need to do is to carry out the experiment and produce data. So, in this sense I just needed to take the pictures that Roland wanted.”

But it ended up not being that simple.

“The problem, though, is that the station is really a place where the standard rules do not necessarily work (where is up or down?) and therefore I quickly found myself in the position of needing to interpret Roland’s ideas and convert them so that they could be implemented on the station,” Nespoi wrote. “At the end, I ended up taking a lot of pictures mixing what I thought Roland wanted and with what was possible at the time and what I thought was interesting and different.”

Getting the incredibly sharp shots Miller was looking for would also normally require a tripod, something that wasn't an option in space. Instead, Nespoli came up with a solution, jerry-rigging the articulated arms that he described as looking like a “double tentacle octopus” built into the station to hold the camera steady.

Even the slightest movements create subtle vibrations in microgravity that, without normal gravity, continue for a long time, Nespoli said.

Because the International Space Station is a busy place, Nespoli added, he also had to take photos in the middle of the night while everyone else was sleeping and the station was quiet so he could control lighting and make sure no one was in the shots.

Each image also had to go through the Italian Space Agency before Miller could see it, Nespoli said. The agency had to make sure the images didn't violate the astronauts' privacy or international agreements.

While Nespoli returned to Earth in December, Miller is still processing some of the photos, he said. The plan is to use the photographs as the basis for a book and display the photos in an exhibit around the time of the book’s release.

That process would likely take several years, Miller said, adding that the book will be a focus of his retirement, which began at the end of May.